The ABC of Computational Text Analysis

#3 Setting up your Development Environment

Alex Flückiger

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
University of Lucerne

09 March 2024

Outline

  • research workflow 📑
  • interacting with computers 🪄
  • installation of programs 🔨

Recap last Lecture

  • textual data is challenging
  • machine-readable data

The Zen of Organizing

Research means Organizing

How a computational approach helps

  • scripts as documentation 📝
  • efficient automation ♻️
    • “don’t repeat yourself”
  • less error-prone 🤦‍♀️ 🤦‍♂️
  • reproducible 💯

Computers

Operating Systems (OS)

Between hardware and programs

  • Microsoft Windows
  • macOS
  • Linux-based systems 🤓

User Interfaces

Graphical User Interface (GUI)

Command Line Interface (CLI)

“An awesome Programmer saves the World”

Human-Machine Interaction

Tell the computer efficiently 🎯

  • text commands instead of clicks
  • similar to human languages
    • syntax (form)
    • semantics (meaning)
  • computers are literalists

Programming

  • command languages
    • Bourne-Again shell (Bash), since 1989
  • programming languages
    • Python, R, Java, C++ etc.
  • instructions → program ≡ algorithm
    • cooking

Package Manager 📦

  • automation of software installation

    • system: apt, Homebrew
    • Python: pip, poetry, conda

  • software dependencies

  • similar to app stores

Open-Source is a Mindset

Standing on the shoulders of giants

  • free + open software
  • cross-platform portability
  • collaboration
    • share + reuse
  • helpful community

Organizing Data and Code

  • Git tracks file changes and allows for version management
  • GitHub is a popular hosting platform based on Git
    • share code and collaborate
    • repository = project folder

🤓 Publishing code and data are key to open science.

Resources everyone is using

Learning by doing, doing by Googleing.
🤸‍♀️🤸‍♂️

Set up your System

Backup 👹

You don’t need it until you desperately need it!

Setting up your Development Environment

Installation

  • Python 3.10
    • packages for NLP + visualization
  • Tesseract
  • various Bash tools
  • VS Code Editor

👉 Follow the installation guide for your OS + general Python chapter.

Relax.
It takes a while.

VS Code Editor

The Microsoft Word for Coding

  • powerful integrated development environment (IDE)
  • cross-platform
  • interactive analysis

Write your first Python script in VS Code

First Steps in Python

Learn Python with interactive tutorials

Readings

Optional: pimp your workflow

Healy, Kieran. 2019. “The Plain Person’s Guide to Plain Text Social Science.” online.

Questions?

References

Healy, Kieran. 2019. “The Plain Person’s Guide to Plain Text Social Science.” https://kieranhealy.org/publications/plain-person-text/.